Call Center

Children’s hospitals are facing increased competition as health systems and community hospitals expand their pediatric services. As a result, children’s hospitals are seeking new and strategic ways to expand their presence and facilitate growth.

One strategy is partnering with local and regional facilities that don’t have the infrastructure or expertise to treat pediatric patients that require specialized care. This may be in the form of dedicated hospitalists, neonatologists, intensivists, and rotational clinics of selected pediatric sub-specialties at the community hospitals. By making their physicians, staff and expertise more accessible to community-based hospitals and physicians patients can receive pediatric services for low-acuity, short-stay visits closer to home and patients needing a higher level of care can be identified and transported appropriately.

According to the Children’s Hospital Association, most dedicated children’s hospitals are the sole regional providers for highly specialized services such as cardiac surgery and transplants, and they offer more than six times the number of services as general hospitals.

As a result, children’s hospitals are realizing that provider-to-provider communication outside their four walls is more important than ever before.

Ann & Robert H. Lurie’s Children’s Hospital of Chicago took a proactive approach to addressing communication challenges. Last year, the hospital served more than 198,000 children from 50 states and 51 countries. But, communication between referring physicians and Lurie Children’s specialists was often challenging because there were too many varied ways to reach specialists, and because PCPs did not always know which specialist to contact.

The hospital along with its clinically integrated network the Lurie Children’s Health Partners (LCHPCIN) chose to implement RapidConnect to facilitate better communication and coordination of care for Chicago’s pediatric patients. Implementing this solution would improve patient care and optimize resource utilization.

“As a NICU hospitalist, RapidConnect is a huge time saver. Now I can skip the operators and answering services and directly reach our outpatient pediatricians via voice or text in a HIPAA-compliant manner,” said Patrick Lyons, MD, Hospital Based Medicine, Lurie Children’s.

In the eleven months since the RapidConnect implementation, 2.600 messages have been sent which includes communication from 34 PCP practices and 28 divisions at Lurie Children’s. Response time is less than 3 minutes for 50 percent of messages

Currently, the system is connecting more than 155 community pediatric partners to Lurie Children’s CIN, with 28 hospital divisions participating. Adoption of Rapid Connect usage continues to increase as new divisions and practices come on board.

To learn more about how RapidConnect is helping Lurie Children’s, see the complete use case here.

With the increased focus on patient satisfaction and its direct link to revenue and reimbursement, it is no surprise that call centers play an increasingly important role for hospitals. The question is, what role should your secure communication solution play in your hospital call center?

We took that question to Lisa Forte, who manages the Call Center at WakeMed Health & Hospitals. With responsibility for three full-service hospitals, more than 900 patient beds and 1,100 staff, Forte’s team fields an average of 75,000 calls per month.

Forte expected to see value from a WakeMed’s new secure communication solution, RapidConnect but was surprised by what it really delivered. By facilitating direct physician-to-physician communication, she hoped the solution would help decrease the number of calls coming through her call center. While she has indeed experienced a 50% decrease in physician-to-physician calls, there are a number of other benefits she and her team have experienced with the help of RapidConnect.

“One of the biggest benefits, is the impact it has had on our communication with the physicians. Historically, call center operators end up being the middlemen between the referring physician and the staff physician. Some physicians simply don’t like to provide the information we need to effectively facilitate that communication, so the operator has to go back and forth between the two. That is not an efficient use of time or resources, is a frustrating experience for everyone involved and can lead to unnecessary delays in patient care,” Forte explained.

“RapidConnect ensures that the right information is sent to the right providers, and also ensures that physicians receive the information in the manner they prefer. That allows the physician to immediately move forward and address the patient’s care, without losing time on time-consuming and frustrating back-and-forth communication,” she said.

Forte is also grateful that RapidConnect has helped the hospital establish one set of guidelines for secure communication. This ensures that everyone follow the same process, that messages are automatically sent to the right people at the right time, and eliminates frustration and confusion about the who, when and how of provider communication.

In the end, Forte believes that RapidConnect has helped her team and WakeMed by: